Command and Control

the roughly seventy thousand nuclear weapons built by the United States: Cited in Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Insitution, 1998), p. 102.

a success rate of 99.99857 percent: Or to put it another way, if a single nuclear weapon had been stolen or detonated, it would have represented a little more than one thousandth of 1 percent of the entire stockpile.

the rate of industrial accidents: Due to variations in record keeping among different countries, any comparison between their accident rates will be imprecise. Nevertheless, the figures that have been compiled do give a sense of relative technological mastery. As the authors of this study found, the “difference in accident rates between developed and developing countries is remarkable.” The workplaces in the developed world are much safer; perhaps 350,000 people die on the job every year, mainly in developing nations. See Päivi Hämäläinen, Jukka Takala, and Kaija Leena Saarela, “Global Estimates of Occupational Accidents,” Safety Science, no. 44 (2006), pp. 137–56.

That rate is about two times higher in India: According to the study, the rate of industrial accidents in the United States is 3,959 per 100,000 workers, and the rate in India is 8,763 per 100,000. Ibid., pp. 145, 147.

three times higher in Iran: The rate in Iran is 12,845 per 100,000. Ibid., p. 153.

four times higher in Pakistan: The rate in Pakistan is 15,809 per 100,000. Ibid., p. 148.

“A World Free of Nuclear Weapons”: George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2007.

“The world is now on the precipice”: Ibid.

the two nations that control about 90 percent of those weapons: Cited in Madeleine Albright and Igor Ivanov, “A New Agenda for U.S.-Russia Cooperation,” New York Times, December 30, 2012.

The campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons: For a fine account of today’s antinuclear movement, see Philip Taubman, The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb (New York: HarperCollins, 2012). For a detailed look at how such disarmament might occur, see “Modernizing U.S. Nuclear Strategy, Force Structure and Posture,” Global Zero U.S. Nuclear Policy Commission, May 2012. And for a strongly contrary point of view, see Rebeccah Heindrichs and Baker Spring, “Deterrence and Nuclear Targeting in the 21st Century,” Backgrounder on Arms Control and Nonproliferation, The Heritage Foundation, November 30, 2012.

“Some argue that the spread of these weapons”: “Remarks by President Barack Obama, Hradcany Square, Prague, Czech Republic,” The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, April 5, 2009.

“Such fatalism is a deadly adversary”: Ibid.

“a world without nuclear weapons”: Ibid.

an average age of seventy-nine: Nunn was sixty-eight; Perry, eighty; Kissinger, eighty-three; and Shultz, eighty-six.

Bush’s counterforce strategy: For an analysis of how the Bush administration planned to use nuclear weapons, see Charles L. Glaser and Steve Fetter, “Counterforce Revisited: Assessing the Nuclear Posture Review’s New Missions,” International Security, vol. 30, no. 2 (Fall 2005), pp. 84–126.

“nuclear disarmament fantasy”: Harold Brown and John Deutch, “The Nuclear Disarmament Fantasy,” Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2007.

“Hope is not a policy”: Ibid.

In 2010 a group of high-ranking Air Force officials: James Wood Forsyth, Jr.; Colonel B. Chance Saltzman, USAF; and Gary Schaub, Jr., “Remembrance of Things Past: The Enduring Value of Nuclear Weapons,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 2010), p. 82.

almost 200 fewer weapons: A report by the two groups suggested that in the future the United States will need only five hundred nuclear weapons for deterrence. See Hans M. Kristensen, Robert S. Norris, and Ivan Oelrich, “From Counterforce to Minimal Deterrence: A New Nuclear Policy on the Path Toward Eliminating Nuclear Weapons,” Federation of American Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, Occasional Paper No. 7, April 2009, p. 44.

the problems with a strategy of minimum deterrence: The morality of killing civilians as an act of vengeance — after their leaders launched a nuclear attack — has always been an awkward subject for deterrence theorists. In a recent book, the author Ron Rosenbaum questioned the ethics of a retaliatory nuclear strike and urged missile crews to disobey any order to launch: “Nothing justifies following orders for genocide.” For a provocative analysis of the issue, see John D. Steinbruner and Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, “Reconsidering the Morality of Deterrence,” CISSM Working Paper, Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, University of Maryland, March 2012; and Ron Rosenbaum, How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). The quote can be found on page 260.

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